Educated opinions

WASHINGTON—In early December members of both parties patted themselves on the back for passing a landmark education bill that reauthorizes the Elementary and Secondary Education Act for the first time in nearly 14 years. The bill attracted overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate, and President Barack Obama pledged to sign it.

“This legislation finally ends Washington’s Common Core mandate,” said Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C. “I look forward to local communities and schools again taking the lead in educating children, as opposed to the Washington bureaucracies that flourished over 15 years under ... No Child Left Behind.”

Sounds like a conservative slam dunk, right? It depends on whom you ask. While many conservative lawmakers and outside groups such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) support the legislation, others say it does little to roll back the federal government’s control over education policy—leading some to predict the new law could become almost as hated as the old one.

“This is a massive bill that keeps the federal government wildly entangled in local school policy,” said Lindsey Burke of The Heritage Foundation. “Conservatives in Congress had an opportunity to actually restore state and local control and this legislation does not do that in any meaningful way.”

The celebratory December scene bore eerie resemblances to January 2002, when President George W. Bush, after making education reform a high priority, signed No Child Left Behind (NCLB) into law. Although the legislation passed the Senate 91-8 and the House 384-45, it didn’t take long for almost everyone to agree NCLB had serious flaws—namely federally mandated testing, achievement benchmarks, and draconian penalties.

“[T]o get that majority, the Bush administration had to make compromises that transformed its modest yet firm vision for the federal role into a sprawling, unworkable mess,” AEI education experts Max Eden and Mike McShane wrote in National Review.

Lawmakers, parents, teachers unions, states, school districts, and anyone else with a vested interest in education agreed on the problems, but agreement on a legislative solution remained elusive. When NCLB expired in 2007, Congress was nowhere near ready to replace it with something better. A law everyone despised remained in place by default—for the last eight years.

One of the most hated NCLB features was penalties the federal government could enforce if students didn’t do well on standardized tests. As the years ticked by, deadlines approached, including the 2014 cutoff to have every student performing at grade level. No state met the mark, an entirely predictable outcome that left all states in danger of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding.

Enter the Obama administration: In 2011 the Department of Education announced it would begin offering waivers from NCLB requirements—thus making Arne Duncan the most powerful education secretary ever. Each state negotiated its own waiver, but they all had strings attached, such as teacher evaluations tied to student test scores. Critics blame the waivers for coercing states into adopting or keeping the controversial Common Core education standards.

Supporters of the new law, which is a combination of Senate and House bills passed last summer, point to the elimination of the waiver scheme as a prime reason to support it—particularly since the Department of Education has been writing waivers that will extend into the next administration. The legislation also gives states the right to set their own academic goals, eliminates a handful of federal programs, and limits the role of testing—although testing is still required in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school.

“This bill still mandates federal testing, but it no longer says, ‘If you don’t do well on these tests, you have to fix your school in these ways,’” AEI’s Eden told me.

Critics say the bill has no enforcement mechanism to protect states from federal overreach. The only one of 40 lawmakers on the bicameral conference committee to vote against the compromise bill, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., did so for several reasons: annual testing requirements; a ban on federal funds following children at failing schools to new schools; increased spending; and allowing federal funds to go to pre-K programs—which is a step toward transforming a K-12 system to a pre-K-12 system.

“The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) is an ironic name for a bill that preserves the present failed model of federal education policy,” said Glyn Wright, executive director of Eagle Forum, which lobbied against the bill. “Our public schools wallow in mediocrity after decades of outsized federal intervention, and ESSA offers little to inspire hope that this situation will change.”

Even the bill’s biggest Republican backers agreed they wanted to do more, but they were willing to take what they could get now. Many questioned the wisdom of fighting for a very conservative bill that the president would surely veto—or that Senate Democrats would block before it reached the president.

Is a mediocre bill better than no bill at all? Again, it depends on whom you ask.

“Voting no is voting to leave in place the Common Core mandate and the national school board and voting against the largest step toward local control of schools in 25 years,” Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., chairman of the Senate education committee, said prior to the vote. “I have decided, like a president named Reagan once advised, that I will take 80 percent of what I want and fight for the other 20 percent on another day.”

Homeschool victory

The education overhaul protects current language exempting homeschoolers and private schools that do not accept federal money.

“This is a major victory for homeschool freedom, and we applaud Congress for retaining and reauthorizing this essential language,” wrote William Estrada, director of federal relations for the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA).

HSLDA and the American Association of Christian Schools (AACS) remained officially neutral on the legislation, but they endorsed certain provisions. While noting serious deficiencies, the two associations cited general movement in the right direction, including the elimination of future waiver-type schemes and curbing the federal government’s ability to implement top-down policies such as Common Core.

“At the end of the day,” said Jamison Coppola of the AACS, “it’s important for Congress to do the work of legislating and to pass a bill that rolls back the authority of the Department of Education.” —J.C.D.